Evans: Photography transformed painting by ending the need for reproduction
Benedict Evans · Creativity and Optimism · Jul 13, 2021 · at 15:09
Benedict Evans compares artificial intelligence breaking conventional paradigms to the way photography historically reshaped painting.
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“There's all sorts of art theory, and you know, Walter Benjamin and everybody else, and like how photography changes the rest of art, because now the aim is no longer to produce a perfect reproduction. And so you could argue we couldn't really have cubism or abstraction without photography coming first. Because that's what breaks the link of your trying to produce, or indeed impressionism, that you can't have impressionism until you've got photography. Yeah, and that art becomes actually much, I mean, that might not be literally true, but clearly that's a sort of a pivot point change. Any actual art historian might argue on the detail of that, but like, clearly you don't, you, once photography comes along, it changes how you think about what painting is.”
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